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Australian volunteer citizen scientists have found four previously unknown planets orbiting a nearby star thanks to a crowd-sourcing project aired on the ABC's Stargazing Live.

The four "Super Earth" planets are about double the size of Earth and are orbiting a star in the Aquarius constellation 600 light years away, said Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator of Zooniverse.

On Tuesday night, Stargazing Live viewers were called on to hunt exoplanets by trawling through observations of about 100,000 stars via a project on the Zooniverse website, which shows recently downloaded data from the Kepler Space Telescope.

What they found excited astronomers.

In 48 hours dozens of candidates were discovered, and four planets were confirmed to be orbiting a star in our interstellar neighbourhood, Dr Lintott said.

The star's planets were "crammed together" and indicated there may be more planets further from the star, he said.

"They're all much closer to the star than even Mercury is to the Sun," he said.

"The closest of them whips around in just three-and-a-half days, so a year is only three-and-a-half days long."

More than 7,000 volunteers classified over 1.5 million points of interest as part of the Exoplanet Explorers project, led by Dr Ian Crossfield from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dr Lintott said he was excited to see the impact of just two days of crowd-sourcing data.

"From experience we're talking the equivalent of a single astronomer working for a couple of years straight, no coffee breaks, no nipping to the loo [to complete this data]," he said.

Stargazing Live host Professor Brian Cox said he could not be more excited about the discovery.

"In the seven years I've been making Stargazing Live this is the most significant scientific discovery we've ever made. The results are astonishing," he said.

The four discovered planets are most likely rocky and far too hot to support human life, Dr Lintott said.

But he said the discovery was important scientifically because it was one of only one or two other systems he knew of where planets were packed together and it might tell astronomers more about how planets form.

Scientists are trying to contact all of the discoverers of the new solar system, with the volunteers who classified the system's data to be listed as co-authors on a scientific paper about the discovery.

"We're just trying to get in touch with them now," Dr Lintott said.

"Lots of Australians will be waking up to a message in their inbox saying they've discovered an exciting planet."

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has led to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets by measuring the brightness of faraway stars.

When a planet passes in front of the star, the star briefly dims or "blinks".

"So what we're actually looking for is a repeated pattern of blinks," Dr Lintott said.

"It's that pattern of blinks that tells us that something is in orbit around it."

The Exoplanet Explorers project is the first time citizen scientists have been able to collaborate and classify "fresh" data from Kepler, as opposed to other projects that use archival data, Dr Lintott said.

"[The data] came down from Kepler via NASA's deep space network in Canberra just a few weeks ago, and so this is almost real-time intervention," Dr Lintott said.

"If we can get that going that's exciting. It means we can get discoveries faster but it also means we can follow up on discoveries faster.

"So I'm very encouraged that, at least with the help of the ABC, it's possible to get through large amounts of data very quickly."

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Wife and I are headed north of Boise, same named town as where we live in California so hooked up with some locals for a spot of dirt to park our trailer. Should be epic. Rumor has it the main highways will be chock a block coming and going. Using smallish back roads and leaving plenty of time for prospecting along the way.

Funny story, two weekends ago we visited sister's wife, they were evacuated for the Detwiler Fire near Yosemite, anyway we talked our way into the evac zone and stayed at the house. All dark as power was out, hot night and the ISS was due to fly over so we watched and waited. Beautiful flyover, with comments of "I've never seen that before" being a good reward. Afterwards I was commenting on seeing "plasma flashes" or the reflection off of the solar panels on satellites when I said, "ok, I want to see a big meteorite with a sparkly tail in green". Not 30 minutes later we get this spectacular meteorite travel right across our field of view, yep, sparkly tail, nope, not green. Special night.

The Moon will be located on the opposite side of the Earth as the Sun and its face will be will be fully illuminated.

When the Moon is Full, it rises at dusk, is directly overhead at midnight, and sets at dawn.

This phase occurs at 18:11 UTC.

This full moon was known by early Native American tribes as the Full Sturgeon Moon because the large sturgeon fish of the Great Lakes and other major lakes were more easily caught at this time of year.

This moon has also been known as the Green Corn Moon and the Grain Moon.

A partial lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes through the Earth's partial shadow, or penumbra, and only a portion of it passes through the darkest shadow, or umbra.

During this type of eclipse a part of the Moon will darken as it moves through the Earth's shadow.

The eclipse will be visible throughout most of eastern Africa, central Asia, the Indian Ocean, and Australia.

Astronomers have spotted some kind of outer space rock that's the first visitor from outside of our solar system that they've ever observed.

The discovery has set off a mad scramble to point telescopes at this fast-moving object to try to learn as much as possible before it zips out of sight.

"Now we finally have a sample of something from another solar system, and I think that's really neat, " says Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, "and so you'd love to see if it looks like stuff in our solar system."

It's long been assumed that an interstellar object like this one should be out there, because giant planets in forming solar systems are thought to toss out bits of space crud that haven't yet glommed into anything. But this is the first time scientists have actually found one.

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Well I fell asleep and didn't go out to watch for Geminids. but I did get up to jog, so got a look east just before first light, and crescent Moon and Jupiter close by, were downright pretty. Tiny pink Mars in that neighborhood too, plus Spica.

Let's see if I wake up and look up tonight. though they are hard to see in the city.

The South Pole of the earth will be tilted toward the Sun, which will have reached its southernmost position in the sky and will be directly over the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.44 degrees south latitude.

This is the first day of winter (winter solstice) in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of summer (summer solstice) in the Southern Hemisphere.